Pelosi insists she is not corrupt
Did you miss the 60 Minutes program last night? If you did, please watch. Makes you wonder why Occupy Wallstreet isn’t Occupy Congress.
This was an enlightening episode exposing all the millions made by Congress with Insider Trading LEGALLY. From the sounds of it, both sides of the political aisle are reaping financial rewards with insider information and are unwilling to make this cash cow illegal.
Nancy Pelosi, when confronted with 60 Minutes ,sure looked nervous and used all the red-herring arguments at her disposal to avoid answering them directly. (A typical tactic of the guilty?)
Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information – but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it’s time for the law to change.
Most former congressmen and senators manage to leave Washington – if they ever leave Washington – with more money in their pockets than they had when they arrived, and as you are about to see, the biggest challenge is often avoiding temptation.
Peter Schweizer: This is a venture opportunity. This is an opportunity to leverage your position in public service and use that position to enrich yourself, your friends, and your family.
Peter Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. A year ago he began working on a book about soft corruption in Washington with a team of eight student researchers, who reviewed financial disclosure records. It became a jumping off point for our own story, and we have independently verified the material we’ve used.
Schweizer says he wanted to know why some congressmen and senators managed to accumulate significant wealth beyond their salaries, and proved particularly adept at buying and selling stocks.
Schweizer: There are all sorts of forms of honest grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy. So it’s not illegal, but I think it’s highly unethical, I think it’s highly offensive, and wrong.
